The attempt to play complicated music on an instrument which one hasn’t even learned the fingering of is probably the commonest weakness of beginning writers.

(“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.)

The intellect cannot do the work of the imagination; the emotions cannot do the work of the imagination; and neither of them can do anything much in fiction without the imagination.

I was not recommending the Gethenian sexual setup: I was using it. It was a heuristic device, a thought-experiment.

and when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going to give you equal pay for equal time.

In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean—the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life.

Fiction in particular, narration in general, may be seen not as a disguise or falsification of what is given but as an active encounter with the environment by means of posing options and alternatives, and an enlargement of present reality by connecting it to the unverifiable past and the unpredictable future.

We’re supposed to be talking about world-making. The idea of making makes me think of making new. Making a new world: a different world: Middle Earth, say, or the planets of science fiction. That’s the work of the fantastic imagination. Or there’s making the world new: making the world different: a utopia or dystopia, the work of the political imag

True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job.